The slums forgot him quickly.
Blood is forgotten in places where it never stops flowing.
Within two days of the Inquisition's silent withdrawal, the name Shen Mo faded back into mud-stained whispers, where rumors went to die. No one spoke of the man with a twig. No one dared to ask why a boy who once tried to hang himself now breathed as if the sky owed him an apology.
He was already gone.
Walking north. Alone.
No supplies. No weapons.
Only purpose.
He did not explain where he was going. He simply walked, his bare feet moving over ice-thinned roads and broken trail paths until the wind grew teeth and the trees stopped growing.
Before him rose the Throat of Heaven.
A mountain so steep it looked like a blade jutting from the world's spine.
Its peak vanished into the clouds above. The locals called it cursed. Not because demons lived there, but because nothing did. No cultivation sect claimed it. No fortress was ever built atop it. No temple had stood long before the foundations collapsed inward. It was the one place where Heaven did not watch.
But the Qi density?
Unnatural.
Up there, the world twisted. Qi currents surged like rivers, unrestrained, spiraling through air and soil like veins of lightning. Records from ancient pathwalkers once claimed the energy saturation could reach up to 120% above equilibrium—a point that was not just dangerous, but biologically corrosive.
Even High-Level Foundation Cultivators suffocated within five days.
But Jian Wuxin climbed anyway.
Because he was not there to breathe.
He was there to drown.
—
The air thinned with each meter. It cut into the lungs like shards of frost. Breathing felt like swallowing glass.
But the Qi…
It sang.
Like a symphony played on the bones of dead gods.
He reached the lower crag within a day. There were no trails now. Just stone and ice, clawing into the heavens. Snow didn't settle here—it evaporated into mist, steamed away by the friction of pure spiritual turbulence.
He found a perch halfway up a shattered ridge—an outcropping shaped like the rib of a dead colossus.
He sat.
And waited.
Not for a sign.
For the pain.
—
On the third breath, his blood began to burn.
On the fifth, his meridians twisted unnaturally. His Qi Sea contracted as if a hand had gripped it from within.
On the ninth, his vision fractured.
He did not stop.
He began to circulate.
Low-speed rotation.
A spiral threading through all five meridians, bypassing the Qi Heart and slowly weaving into the nascent core forming deep inside his Dantian. It wasn't stable. It wasn't even real yet. But it was there—like frost on glass before the sun breaks through.
—
On the second night, the spirit beasts came.
Not out of malice.
But hunger.
They smelled the leaking Qi from his body.
First came the Spinewolves, long, thin creatures whose vertebrae poked out of black fur like blades. They stalked him for hours before lunging silently through the sleet.
He killed them with his breath.
Not metaphorically.
He inhaled, gathered Qi, and exhaled with a thread of Inner Sound—an echo of an old technique from the Heavenpiercer Sword Manual.
The wolves dropped mid-air. Skulls cracked by a frequency their senses could not comprehend.
More came.
Crimson-Tongue Apes.
White-Eyed Falcons.
A Shadow-Leopard whose claws could pierce jade.
He fought them with rocks. Branches. Even the very bones of the Spinewolves he'd killed.
Every time he fought, he focused on how each item moved like a sword.
And every time he released his grip, the weapon turned to ash.
Not because of force.
But because his Qi rejected the world's fragility.
—
By the fourth day, his skin began to change.
Not visibly. But beneath it.
His blood had adapted. It now held trace Qi memory.
His lungs no longer cried for air. Instead, they pulsed—like second hearts, threading raw Qi into his nervous system. Each breath did not bring life. It brought friction, the kind that burned away anything weak.
His bones creaked as the Qi pushed through them.
Shen Mo did not scream.
He smiled.
Because he knew what this was.
He had called it once in his past life the First Shedding—a stage of cultivation most never reached. Not a realm, but a breaking point.
The Body Refusal Stage.
Where the body begins to reject itself, and if it survives, becomes something that was never human to begin with.
No teacher had brought him here.
He had walked.
No technique had guided him.
He had bled.
And now the Qi no longer pierced him.
It bowed.
—
On the fifth day, something changed.
A memory surfaced.
Not of battles. Not of his blade. But of Shen Mo.
The boy before him.
—
There was a girl.
He saw her in flashes, not scenes.
A smile that wasn't really a smile.
Eyes that apologized when no one asked.
A hand that once reached out and pulled the rope from his neck—only to disappear months later.
She had jumped into the rivers near Southfall Bridge.
She didn't leave a note. She didn't need to.
Because Shen Mo already knew.
She had said once:
> "The world doesn't hate us.
It just forgets to feed us."
He never forgot that line.
Because she was right.
And so he climbed the bridge a week later, alone, and waited for the moment the world would forget to feed him too.
But it didn't.
Because Jian Wuxin's soul landed.
—
Shen Mo stood now atop the ridge.
His skin cracked.
Not from cold.
But from the surge of Qi that now treated his body as a vessel rather than a victim.
The snow fell harder. The beasts circled but did not approach.
The air was almost gone.
His inner world now echoed with clarity.
He stepped to the edge.
Looked down.
And whispered:
> "You did not die for nothing."
> "I will make the world remember what it forgot."
—
The wind answered.
And far below, something massive stirred in the frozen ravine.
Its breath shook the mountain.
A final trial, before he would be ready to descend.
The Twelve-Tusked Spirit Mammoth, lord of the Throat of Heaven, awakened from hibernation.
Waiting.
Watching.
He gripped another branch.
And smiled.